Ruth Bader Ginsburg isn’t a fan of the Constitution

In an interview with a Middle Eastern television station, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, perhaps the most reliable Leftist vote on the Supreme Court, said that the United States Constitution should not serve as a basis of law in Egypt:

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has caused a storm of controversy by saying in a television interview that the people of Egypt should not look to the United States Constitution when drafting their own governing document because it’s too old and there are newer examples from which to draw inspiration.

“I would not look to the U.S. Constitution if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012,” Ginsburg said in the interview, which aired on Jan. 30 on Al-Hayat TV.

Her comments have stunned writers across the conservative blogosphere, though many major media outlets have not given much attention to it.

In the interview, she argued that the United States has the “oldest written constitution still in force in the world,” so instead “you should certainly be aided by all the constitution-writing that has gone one since the end of World War II.”

“I might look at the constitution of South Africa,” Ginsburg said. “That was a deliberate attempt to have a fundamental instrument of government that embraced basic human rights, had an independent judiciary.”

Ginsberg’s comments are reprehensible for a couple of different reasons. While our Constitution is imperfect, the Founding Fathers did include a mechanism for changing it via the amendment process in Article V. This process wasn’t supposed to be easy, but the process has served us well. Ginsburg failed to note this, at least in the comments that I’ve read.

I’m not a nationalist or someone that gets worked up about “American exceptionalism,” but I do take issue with a sitting Supreme Court Justice taking demeaning the Constitution that she is supposed to protect and defend in an interview with a foreign news outlet. Again, the Constitution may not be a perfect document, but its significance, given the government it created and rights it protects, cannot be understated

Of course, Ginsberg and the Leftist bloc on the court have been issuing opinions to fit their views since the beginning of the Progressive Era (and yes, conservatives are just as guilty. In other words, constitutional restrictions have mattered little in the last 80 years or so. If she had her way, mob rule would be the law of the land.